Our faith in the police has been rocked many times in recent decades, but the
findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel have revealed systematic
dishonesty on a shocking scale

When Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing drama-documentary on the Hillsborough disaster was broadcast on television in December 1996, the shock was palpable. Everyone thought they knew what had happened: fans arriving late for an FA Cup semi-final were let into a dangerously crammed part of the ground by the police, who were subsequently criticised by Lord Justice Taylor’s official inquiry report for their lamentable crowd control.

An inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death for all 96 victims. Compensation was paid to some of the victims’ families and to police officers who had been traumatised by the awful tragedy of April 15 1989 – the highest loss of life at a sports event in British history.

But McGovern offered a different story, one told from the perspective of the bereaved families, which they felt had been wilfully ignored. It exposed the obvious contradiction between the Taylor Report, which found that South Yorkshire Police were culpable, and the verdict of the inquest – something with which the families had never been reconciled. But it went further still by suggesting that vital evidence was lost or tampered with to suppress the truth and save the jobs and reputations of senior officers.

This was the bit that many found hard to accept; it felt like trial by television, an allegation of what amounted to a substantial cover-up. Yet, as we know now, it was all true. If anything, McGovern underplayed the lengths to which South Yorkshire Police went to deflect blame from themselves and dump it on the fans. As this week’s report from the Hillsborough Independent Panel disclosed, alterations were made to 164 police statements, 116 of them “to remove or alter comments unfavourable” to South Yorkshire Police. This was not done by a couple of junior constables in the canteen but on the direct orders of senior officers.

Similar allegations had, in fact, been made to the official inquiry several years earlier; and while Lord Justice Taylor was aware of the changes he accepted them as part of a genuine legal process of review and submission. After the McGovern programme, however, the incoming Labour government in 1997 ordered an independent scrutiny of evidence by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith. He was also told of the alterations to police accounts, which were again justified in order to remove personal opinion and conjecture. But it was clear that statements had been amended to eliminate criticism of senior officers and their management of the crowd.

Knowing all this for years, as the families did, it is unsurprising that they have nursed a burning sense of grievance at the failure of the authorities to acknowledge what went on. Was there something in the nature of the judicial inquiries that failed to uncover the truth? Both Taylor and Stuart-Smith were judges of the utmost integrity, yet they failed to reach the conclusions staring them in the face (though Taylor, to a great extent, did; it was just that no one was prepared to listen).

The independent panel chaired by the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, appears to have had one characteristic absent from the earlier inquiries – a willingness to accept that the police could have been cynical enough to cover up the truth behind such a dreadful event. Nor is it difficult to understand the anger and frustration of the bereaved families when you consider that thousands of documents that should have been in the public domain were suppressed.

Worst of all has been the realisation that many lives might have been saved had the police and the emergency services responded as they should have done to the unfolding disaster. In addition, we now know that police officers carried out computer checks on those who had died in an attempt “to impugn the reputations of the deceased”.

The coroner took blood alcohol levels from all of the deceased, including children, to try to draw a link between the late arrival of fans and heavy drinking, a view that the panel found to be “fundamentally flawed”. Alcohol consumption was “unremarkable and not exceptional for a social or leisure occasion”. Is it any surprise, then, that the families came to suspect the entire establishment was engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to keep the truth from coming out?

Looking back across almost a quarter of a century, it is hard to believe that the police were able to get away with it, especially as they had “form” in this area. A few months after Hillsborough, four men convicted of the IRA bomb attack in Guildford in 1974 were freed by the Court of Appeal after an inquiry found notes taken by the police were not written up immediately and that officers may have colluded on the wording of the statements. Two years later, the release of the Birmingham Six, also wrongly convicted of terrorist offences, exposed another massive miscarriage of justice.

For those who considered the British police to be essentially incorruptible (certainly compared to their foreign counterparts), there was a succession of disclosures throughout the Seventies and Eighties to shake such convictions to the core. Forty years ago, Robert Mark, who had been appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to clean out the bad apples at Scotland Yard, only half jokingly defined a good police force as “one that catches more crooks than it employs”. Scandals involving faked evidence, abuse of power and taking bribes overwhelmed the Flying Squad, the Special Patrol Group and the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, which was disbanded as a result.

A culture of impunity was endemic throughout the police – so much so that in 1984 the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in a bid to smash it. The impact of the new legislation, however, was still working through the system in 1989; and the prevailing attitudes in South Yorkshire Police meant there was a propensity to dissemble. Its officers saw themselves as battle‑hardened by years of tackling industrial strife, including several pitched battles with striking miners. After Hillsborough, they thought they could get away with misleading everyone about what really happened – and to a great extent, they did.

Until this week, many people might have accused the police of incompetence but they would have balked at conspiracy. Yet, as David Cameron said in the Commons on Wednesday, the families had long accused the authorities of attempting to create a completely unjust account of events that sought to blame the fans; and they were right.

Could it happen today? Freedom of Information laws and the forensic immediacy offered by the internet make it far less likely. When Ian Tomlinson died at a G20 protest, the first reaction of the police was to claim he was a threat, even though he was an innocent bystander. Their problem was that the incident in which he was struck by an officer was filmed and posted on YouTube. Everyone could see what had happened, if not who was responsible for Mr Tomlinson’s death.

Three years ago, it was claimed that more than 70 police officers had been injured during protests by environmentalists at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent. It later transpired, after a Freedom of Information request, that there were just 12 reportable injuries, only four of which involved direct contact with another person. Similarly, the story told immediately after the shooting of the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in 2005 bore only a passing resemblance to what actually happened. Today’s police force may be more open, accountable and professional than it was back in the Eighties but its default position can still be one of concealment or deliberate distortion.

Over the years, the police have been one British institution that has proudly stood comparison with the very best in the world: unarmed (though less so than they used to be), impartial, independent and largely incorruptible. Perhaps that was always a naive caricature; but it was a view so deeply ingrained in our national psyche that we were unwilling to give credence to powerful evidence that suggested otherwise. However, it was not only the police who let down the Hillsborough families: the very institutions that most of us trust to get to the bottom of things – the courts, the media and Parliament – were all culpable. The families suffered a terrible loss; the very least they were entitled to was the truth.